


Reunion

by blackeyedblonde



Series: Clouds of Dust [2]
Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Pre-film release
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:51:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1764545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, the dust will give back what it took away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reunion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hartcohle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hartcohle/gifts).



> This is based off nothing more than a vague three-minute trailer and is being published on this day nearly six months before the actual movie release, so maybe cut me some slack where I falter lol. Just some impending daddy feels for ya nerves. I have no shame left.

There had once been a time when the harvest season made Murph’s fingertips ache in phantom anticipation, left her bemoaning the thought of setting out on the front porch and shucking that night’s supper under grandpop’s watchful eye. She’d sit there looking out into nothing but a whispering sea of green split open by a ribbon of tire-tracked dirt, plucking silk like spider-fine banjo strings and wishing they could buy golden ears wrapped in plastic from the grocery just the same as everybody else.

These days, nothing surrounds the house she grew up in but blackened earth scourged barren by fire. Grandpop’s dead and gone, he himself withered back into dust. There is no corn left to shuck, nothing here to crop and yield but the far-flung light of the harvest moon.

She’ll still sit on the brittle-bone porch sometimes, wrapped up in a faded canvas jacket that hangs too big on her frame. The nighttime sky stretches out as far as her eyes will carry, touching down to meet the rolling horizon in a smooth, perfect seam.

There had once been a time when Murph thought she could run to the end of the earth and fall into space, get swallowed up whole by that vast blackness strewn with stars. There’d been hope, then—like maybe she could reach out and touch what she’d lost, brush her fingers against each white-hot pinprick of diamond light until they whispered answers in her ear.

Nowadays, the stars only seem to mock her.

* * *

They don’t call her when it happens. They don’t call her brother, either, but that’s the way things usually go when a man’s been dead for nigh on ten years. Even so, Murph won’t think to ask why until a handful of weeks later, and by then she doesn’t really need to hear an answer.

Twenty-five years gone.

She wouldn’t have believed them anyways.

* * *

The old house has long since given in and shaken off its timeworn coat—paint cracking and blowing away piece by piece with every passing year—, but the frame stands strong, sitting mummified there atop a tomb of sunbaked sand.

People ask why she lives out there still, alone and a good fifteen miles away from anything that could lay claim to being called civilization. The electricity still works on a prayer but the water comes and goes as it pleases, more often than not runs muddy from the faucet, and it’s so goddamn quiet she sometimes swears you can hear the rustle of night fall in a velvet drape out over the earth.

People ask, and she only tells them that she made a promise.

_I’m comin’ back._

* * *

Murph can see the dust cloud rolling in from a few miles away.

It moves slower than a storm, isn’t anywhere near as big, and before she runs inside to find her mask it occurs to her that somebody’s coming down the road in a red pickup truck.

She thinks about getting the shotgun for a few seconds and then decides against it. Anything worth stealing was sold off or traded years ago, and if they’re going to kill her for the pantry rations she hopes they like Twinkies and Kool-Aid powder.

The dust cloud gets closer, and Murph sits on the porch steps and waits.

* * *

By the time Murph hit 30 she’d already outlived her mother, even managed to finally beat her older brother at something for the first time in life—though by that time, nobody had been too keen on marking down a tally.

Now she’s 37 with 38 coming up fast around the bend and pretty soon she’ll have outlasted her father. At least the memory of him she keeps tucked away in the folds of her mind, all laughing brogue, wind-chafed hands, the lingering smell of diesel and clean sweat. A faint echo trapped inside the threadbare elbows and splitting seams of an old jacket she wears like a second skin.

He would have been 63 this year.

* * *

The red pickup truck rolls to a stop far enough away from the house that she can’t clock the driver—alone, male, with close-cropped dark hair—, and Murph stands from the steps when he swings the door wide, wraps a hand around her opposite elbow in a nervous stance she’s never been able to shake.

He doesn’t even close the door, just leaves the keys dinging in the ignition and stands there sagging like his bones have turned to lead and bolted him steadfast to the ground.

A paltry gust of wind sweeps by and brings a shower of dust along with it, and her hair blows across her eyes just as he takes his first few steps forward, moving across the ground like a rough-angled mirage.

She reaches up to thumb auburn strands away until she can see clear again and finds him standing a few paces away from the steps, not a day older than the day he left.

“Murph,” he says, the sound of her name flayed raw in his throat.

She falls to her knees and tries to vomit, but nothing comes up on an empty stomach.

* * *

He’s down on the ground when she stops heaving, hands fisted in the jacket hanging off her rawboned frame, hauling her up into his lap and pulling her close without any rhyme or reason as to where they end up, bowed down over her and shaking with his face pressed against the pale warmth of her neck.

Murph blinks, still too shocked to cry, eventually feels him pull away to sit up and cup her face between his hands. She stares up into the same deep blue eyes from before, now rimmed angry red and stricken, and finds an echo of her voice, just enough to ask, just enough to _see_ —

“Daddy?” she whispers, and when he nods, teeth sunk down into his bottom lip deep enough to draw blood, she lets out a sob that nearly breaks her in half.

But he’s there, kissing the corners of her eyes and rocking her in his lap, murmuring a stream of nonsense words into the soft hair above her ear. Trying to get her to stop crying despite being half-blinded by tears himself, shushing her just the same as he always did.

* * *

Later, when there’s time for questions— _where did you go, what did you see, what did you bring back?_ —, Murph will ask them. And then, inevitably, her words taper down until there’s only one syllable weighing heavy on the tip of her tongue.

“How?”

Coop hums in his chest and pulls her closer to his side where they’re hunkered down on the porch steps, looking out over the broken flask of night.

“Can’t say,” he says, murmuring the words against her temple. “Not sure if I’ll ever know.” Silence thrums in an easy heartbeat around them, and then he’s asking, “What do you think?”

Murph wraps her arms around his middle and leans in, still thrown by how differently their bodies align now, one stretched and pulled into something different, something older, and the other left inexplicably the same.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Must be Murphy’s Law.”

* * *

Twenty-five years ago there’d been a drone chase and a flat tire on a gravel road, two bodies leaning back against the ticking warmth of an old blue pickup, more questions asked because some things won’t ever change no matter where you look.

Murph wrapped her arms around herself, dragging the toe of her shoe across the dirt. “Dad, why’d you name me after something that’s bad?”

“Well, we didn’t.”

She gave him a look. _“Murphy’s Law_?”

Coop had pushed away from the truck and turned to face her, hands hitched up high on his hips. The sinking sun eclipsed behind his head, and for a moment it looked like he was wearing a burning halo.

“Murphy’s law doesn’t mean that something bad will happen,” he said. “It means that whatever _can_ happen, will happen.”

“Good things too?” Murph asked.

Coop had grinned, reaching out to gently tug on her ponytail. “I don’t see why not.”

* * *  
  


As it turns out, the dust will give back what it took away.  
  
  
  



End file.
